Prelude

Look, we all know what this is all about by now. A Steam Next Fest happens, I play entirely too many demos on Twitch, get by mind blown by at least one amazing thing, then I write a little bit about all of them. It's a good routine to keep! I highly recommend adopting this practice.

One interesting thing I noticed this go around was an unexpectedly high (read: non-zero) number of games made for retro platforms. Whether those are emulated re-issues translated for the first time, modern homebrew adhering to real hardware restrictions or native ports to modern platforms, it was fascinating to witness both the games in general and the wildly-varying-quality emulator frontends used...

As ever, these reflect the free playable demos released in June 2026. The full releases, if they occur, may be better. Or worse. Or some mysterious, terrifying third option.

The Good Stuff

70s-style Robot Anime Geppy-X: Originally released in Japan in the ass-end of the PS1's life-cycle, this incredibly charming tribute to 1970s giant-robot anime (particularly Getter Robo) has finally been given the translation treatment by way of a subtitle overlay. The (incredibly charming) FMV sequences have also been given a framerate-boosting remaster from old pre-compression Betamax tapes (with some optional mediocre AI upscaling), really showcasing the extra love given to the package. Bosses feel very bullet-spongey, which is a bit of a pity, and an option to add subtitles for the lyrics of the vocal themes that play through each level would be a lovely little extra, but on the whole this is a real smile-inducer of a package.

Blood Dungeon: Nidhogg creator Messhof and his taste in abrasive visual styles venture forth into the already-extremely-packed world of Vampire Survivors-alikes. I think this one's going to stand out though, and not just for its charming MSPaint-core artstyle - unlike most Survivor-likes, it's actually a 2D platformer, and one with some fantastic game-feel. Clambering around across all surfaces just feels natural, and running from horde to horde is enjoyable and frictionless. Keep an eye on this one.

Changable Guardian ESTIQUE: A new shmup for the NES hardware, put together by a squad of veterans of the console's original commercial lifespan (including the creator of Zanac and The Guardian Legend!). There's some real techncial chops here, stretching the original hardware to its limits with a lot of different bullets and monsters flying around with seemingly no slowdown (unless they overclocked the console in their emulator?) and some cool stylistic touches - the genre-traditional warning that you're about to fight a boss looks slick! One entertaining little twist is that this pack contains both Famicom and NES versions, each of which has a different storyline as a nod to the localization meddling of the era!

Normal Golf Game: A magnificent first-person golf-adjacent game by the creator of Fruit Ninja with a QWOP-esque approach to making your swing, and a knack for getting constantly distracted by minigames before you even get to play a single hole. Lovely graphics, a charming sense of humor and a genuinely entertaining gameplay mechanic ensures that if they can keep up the sheer rate of gimmicks, this thing is gonna be absolutely massive once it lands.

Roguecraft DX: A non-emulated, native port of a modern, homebrew roguelike created for the Amiga by the insane people that continue to bend that system to their iron will. The gameplay is fairly simplified and casual compared to your typical Nethackery (It was designed for joysticks with only one button, after all!) but the utterly gorgeous pixel art and atmospheric mod tracker music create an utterly immaculate vibe. I really dig it, and it's probably good fun as a lunch-break roguelike.

SiN Reloaded: Night Dive doing as they traditionally do to the game that needed too many 50mb patches on dial-up connections to truly challenge Half-Life 1. As technically solid as ever, although the new graphics are so faithful to the old that you have to squint a bit to tell them apart. (HINT: The old ones are the ones with constant disconcerting vertex wobbling making them look like they're made of jelly!) You already know whether you want this or not based on how much your knees hurt.

ReStory: Chill Electronics Repairs: A chill casual game to relax and study to about dismantling, cleaning and fixing various appliances, most of which are fictionalized out of legal firing distance but some are very much not - it's unexpectedly funny to repair offbrand "Razorola" phones and "Eggagochi" toys before being charged with fixing up a proper-ass, licensed Atari 2600 standing out like a square cock. There's some interesting strategy in having to salvage parts from each repair where you can in order to make future repairs cheaper. Might be one to watch!

Scirocco Thugs: A gleefully messy first-person brawler, revelling in its Quake1-polycount-ass depiction of random Italian industrial areas as you punch, kick, combo, bludgeon and very rarely shoot your way through legions of soccer thugs and the occasional mobster. Good game feel and great audio, combined with a game mechanic where you have to kill stunned enemies by kicking them into low orbit, make for a hilarious and enjoyable time spent lining enemies up to most efficiently punt motherfuckers into other motherfuckers. Excited for this one, well worth a play.

Phantom Gear: Another emulated homebrew game! This time for the Sega Genesis. This charming, polished platformer is very Mega Man-esque with some Treasure influences. Presentation is polished (the cutscenes do a particularly fantastic job of doing the whole motion-comic thing), controls and difficulty feel Just About Right, and the FM Synth music is absolutely gorgeous and up there with the Genesis's finest. Worth keeping an eye on!

HYPER DETONATOR: A pretty simple twin-stick shooter with a bit of low-resolution style and a satisfying gimmick focusing on hitting big glowing hit points on glowing blob-like enemies. It's pretty fun, and I quite enjoy the various stylised touches, but I'm not entirely certain how well it'll stretch into a full game with a price tag - what else can be added without actively detracting from the experience?

Fame or Folly: A Balatro-like with a Blackjack-esque game design centered around a travelling troupe of entertainers, where you play your cards to try and hit your Applause score without busting out on your Tension points (ex. drunks by themselves are very entertaining, but a stage packed full of them will just create scandal!) The pixel art is utterly lovely (which makes it such a goddamn shame that it's so often unevenly scaled), and I really enjoyed the risk-vs-reward gameplay. Well worth keeping an eye on.

Washington Prime: A UZDoom-powered FPS set in a 1990s office building, fuelled by Die Hard and the Mac OS Classic FPS Prime Target. The visuals are charmingly cheesy (sadly, the FMVs are not in the demo) and the gameplay is as enjoyable as it is gravel-pulverisingly brutal - a single low-level enemy can put you in the dirt with one or two hits, and I rarely spent the entire demo with more than 20 health. The developer has since promised some balance tweaks, but this is still an utter blast for FPS Gods or the save-scum set (me, its me).

Onimusha: Way of the Sword: I'll admit, I'm not hugely familiar with the Onimusha series outside of it basically being Samurai Resident Evil and also Jean Reno was in one of them. I should probably acquiant myself with them more, to be honest, because this was good fun - a third-person bash with a few fragments filched from the Soulslike template without outright being one of those. And of course, it looks like a million bucks with Capcom's usual level of polish.

Project Turboblast: A lightning-fast, futuristic arcade racer by someone who clearly didn't have very many ideas about what the actual futuristic racecars should look like (aah, just have a normal modern sportscar model, wheels and all, it'll be fiiine) but had very, very specific opinions about what the robotic rabbit mascots should look like, if you catch my drift. The music is fantastic, and while the gameplay takes a moment to dial in, once you do it feels great to boost and drift around each track. Worth keeping an eye on.

About Fishing: A bizarre and morbid fishing RPG, channeling many of the Dreamcast's finest and most eccentric hours fused with a darkly Lynchian atmosphere and an utterly incredilble soundtrack as you attempt to catch fish and also solve a murder or two, possibly simultaneously. A truly unique experience. I'm not much of an art-game guy, and I'm probably pretty notorious for my knuckle-dragging ways, so when I say "Play it immediately, I'm not asking" it should say a thing or two...

Antimatcher: A simple and fairly chill puzzle game about assembling spheres of matter together in such a specific way as to match (and wipe out) a given configuration of antimatter. It's kind of basic and largely relies on trial and error, but it tickled my brain nicely enough. The developer is only promising a couple of hours of content for the final game, so if the price is right it might be a pleasant enough evening diversion.

Culdcept the First: More localizations of Japan-only 32-bit games! This time, a localized version of the classic first entry in a long-running (And ongoing, as a recent Nintendo Direct testifies! That's why this port even exists in the first place, as a glorified ad!) series of Monopoly-meets-Magic-the-Gathering JRPG board games... if that makes sense. Very charming pixel art, great music, and a modern translation that's honestly a little bit rough (the time from zero to "it can't be helped" is somewhere in the realm of 15 minutes!). Well worth a look.

SPRAWL zero: Utterly sublime tribute to early-2000s FPS games like Halo 2 and Half-Life 2. Great art direction and level design, fuelling a unique and well-designed gameplay mechanic where instead of cultivating and reloading a small arsenal of weapons, you're constantly pick-and-flicking through all your enemies' dropped weapons. Also, one of those weapons is quite possibly one of the best videogame shotguns in years. The buzz this has gotten since its announcement is well deserved - this thing is gonna conquer the world once it lands, and deservedly so!

The Bad Stuff

Dorts: A Darts Roguelike: "Darts-atro" is a very funny idea and the core principles are sound, but between the extremely placeholder-y menus, Unity Asset Flip vibes (the crowd is made up of like, at least eight different art-styles!), and incredible lack of sauce in all other departments (why is the voiceover just saying the score instead of screaming it like the announcers on the TV do?), the end result is just kind of a sad shadow of what it could have been.

Lady Death Demonicron: Hey, remember that side-scrolling beat-em-up adaption of The Phantom that we checked out last year? Well, here's another one of those by the same developer using a different comic character. You know a game's gonna be good when the Options menu is disabled in the demo, and the default sound mix is so loud that even the most basic punch causes clipping! The graphics are passable enough for the comic book theme, but animation framerates are hilariously inconsistent - Lady Death's animations are consistently smooth enough when she's breasting around boobily, but dismembering a monster in one of the assorted fatality animations suddenly drops down to flipbook levels! All in all, extremely funny unintentionally.

Cop Bastard: An extremely simple FPS themed on Asian action cinema that's very clearly made by one person, where pretty much every gameplay element intended for the final game is present in the demo level. The particle effects are suitably gratuitous, with every gunshot resulting in a thick plume of whatever surface it hits getting atomized, but that's about where the good stuff ends. Hyper-linear level design, mediocre low-poly graphics, extremely basic gameplay, and the constant dulcet tones of Eastern Europeans doing bad Japanese accents. Disappointing to say the least.

Just a Gun: Casual incremental game about upgrading a single weapon to an absurd degree, ala Cookie Clicker. Unpolished to a point where the primary verb in the game - shooting the only gun in the game - doesn't feel fun to do, which is just about the most damning thing one can say about a game which focuses exclusively on one thing.

The "Ehhhhh..." Stuff

Dodonpachi Resurrection Reignite: A fresh port of an arcade classic that's already had a decent port to Steam for a little under a decade now. Both versions riff off the same Japan-only Xbox 360 port from... christ, 2010? so they're seemingly very similar to the untrained eye. Maybe some slowdown emulation is more accurate? I'unno. The full game is promising lots of extra modes (including an inspired-looking multiplayer mode that's Basically Just Super Mario Bros 35), but none of those are in the demo so I can't judge them. Also, it crashed on me when the level changed while OBS was capturing from it, which, huh.

4x4 in a Furniture Store: A driving-centric physics puzzler where all the puzzles entail piloting a 4x4 offroader around a not-an-Ikea while not-the-Wii-Shop music plays. It's kind of neat, and the way various not-an-Ikea furniture displays are integrated into puzzles is fairly cute. Not really my thing though, I didn't really have the patience for it at the time. Give it a try, it might be your catnip.

BRAZILLIAN DRUG DEALER BEFORE 4: Violently loud and obnoxious shitpost of a Quake mod, revelling in absurdity, bugginess and hearing damage. Probably should not qualify as "good" under any circumstances, but god help me, I had fun dodging and rocket-jumping around this low-poly fever dream. You already know whether you want this or not, and given the previous game was like five bucks, you already know whether or not the price is right.

Kaido Genkai: A CarPG in the vein of Choro Q. Look, maybe I'm just a drifthead from playing too much Ridge Racer and Outrun 2006, but I found the car handling to be VERY stiff, with navigating tigher turns being a pretty painful experience. I also wasn't a big fan of the soundtrack, which is almost entirely low-fi indie J-Pop, but that's on me TBH. Probably the kind of thing where if you get it, you really get it, but I found it easy to bounce off of.

Screenbound: This puzzle-platformer has a fascinating premise - a 3D world where many elements, like platforms and enemies, are invisible unless you look at and cross-reference your Game Boy, which has a 2D pixel-art view of the world, but it's largely squandered on a mostly generic, hyper-linear platformer experience with only a couple of little sprinklings of what is possible. Hell, they even just drop the gimmick completely and go entirely 2D for the boss battle! The level design is slightly more interesting in the back-half of the demo, but between the missing potential and some awful voice acting, I wasn't exactly sold on the full game...

NAMCO LEGENDARY Mountains: Basically Suika Game but in 3D and with voxelized, 3D-ified arcade sprites. Cute and fun, and would be well worth it as a $5 minigame or a bonus in an emulated game collection... but instead it's going to be a $30 stand-alone release. Which is... an ambitious strategy for what is being offered.

Temple Maker 64: It's Super Mario Maker, but it's Ocarina of Time... which is a hell of a sentence, come to think of it. Suitably N64-centric artstyle, nice music, slightly fiddly controls. Promising enough, but the current lack of parts variety hurts it. Presumably a full version will allow you to place things that aren't brown, but it's relying on Kickstarter funding and going to need quite a kick to reach the finish line with a week to go from writing, so, uh,

Valor Mortis: First-person Souls-like with a Napoleonic-Wars-with-zombies setting. Impressive graphics and some fun ideas, but it's kinda janky on the gameplay side. I wanted to like it, but all things considered, it left me a little cold.

Wind Runners: 2D flying roguelite in the vein of Time Pilot, Luftrausers, Mini Squadron on the iPhone (remember that?) etc. etc... Some neat ideas, but lacking polish. Attacking ground targets like turrets is a huge pain in the ass, and overall the whole thing felt a bit hollow and weightless.

Please, Spin: A Wheel of Fortune Balatro-like, with some blatant copying of Clover Pit's homework for the theme and interface, right down to freely wandering around your little torture dungeon to use interface elements and find secrets. There's some promise there, but it really needs to find its own identity.

Gunstoppable: Yet another FPS roguelite, with a side of Extremely Marvel Writing. There's some fun here with the rail-grinding and grappling mechanics enabling a whole lot of manouverability, but everything lacks oomph and there's enough jank that it's not going to trouble Gunfire Reborn or Deadlink anytime soon.

Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun 2: Hey, remember Boltgun? It's more of that, with an additional playable character. Great graphics and audio as ever, and the feedback as you reduce your enemies to paste is as good as ever, but the level design is just kind of long and tedious. Maybe playing Sprawl Zero first was a bad idea...

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